Having worked as a high school teacher in her native Punjab, Savitri Chowdhary arrived in Britain in 1932 after a four- or five-year separation from her husband, Dr Dharm Sheel Chowdhary, who had come to Britain for postgraduate medical studies and recently begun work at a practice in the small Essex town of Laindon. On arrival, she found her husband had, to a large extent, adapted to English life and encouraged her to do the same. Shedding her saris for dresses and cutting her hair short, Chowdhary sought to fulfil the role of a doctor’s wife in an English town and to immerse herself in community life.

However, she also remained in touch with her Indian self, wearing saris for evening engagements, cooking curry at home, and socializing with the middle-class Indian community in London. Not only did she and her husband help establish early British Hindu organizations such as the Hindu Association of Europe and the Hindu Centre, but Savitry Chowdhary, on the encouragement of an English friend, Miss Cresswell, also became involved with the India League, attending – and occasionally speaking at – political meetings in London.

In the early 1950s Savitri Chowdhary published one of the earliest Indian cookery books with Andre Deutsch, subsequently giving talks on Indian cooking and even making television appearances to demonstrate her skills.

Born in 1929 to Benegal Rama Rau, a member of the Round Table Conference, financial advisor to the Simon Commission and ambassador, and Dhanvanthi Rama Rau, a pioneer of birth control and president of the All-India Women’s Conference, Santha Rama Rau was a journalist, dramaturge and travel writer. She travelled widely throughout her life, moving to England with her family in 1929, when just six years old, because of her father’s involvement with the Simon Commission. During the 1930s, she attended a Quaker school in Weybridge, Surrey, with her older sister Premila, before moving on to St Paul’s School, London. Her book Gifts of Passage describes the years of her childhood as ‘spent in English schools and in holidays on the Continent’ (p. 23), which underlines the cosmopolitan, elite character of her life. When in London, her parents took in refugees from concentration camps, including Lilian Ulanowsky, a Jewish refugee from Vienna who became guardian for the sisters when their mother went to join their father in South Africa. The family were all in South Africa during the outbreak of the Second World War. Unable to get passage back to England, they decided to return to India, when Santha was 16, to stay with the children’s grandmother. Rama Rau describes returning to India and experiencing nostalgia for Britain in her Home to India, the book which launched her career as a writer and was published when she was just 22 years old.

Rama Rau completed her university education at Wellesley College in the US in 1944, and made her home in New York City from the early 1950s. She married the diplomat Faubion Bowers, an expert on Asian arts and theatre. The two travelled together through Southeast Asia, Africa and Soviet Russia. They had a son together but later divorced, and Rama Rau went on to marry Gurdon Wallace Wattles in 1970.

In her book on Rama Rau, Antoinette Burton describes ‘the modicum of fame [she] achieved’ as resulting ‘mainly from her success at being recognized as an authority on India on the eve of independence’ (p. 4). To the ‘West’, she offered an ‘insider’s view’ of Indian culture, countering stereotyping and Orientalist misrepresentations, especially in This is India. Her literary achievement that is perhaps best known in Britain is her adaptation of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India for the stage, produced on Broadway in 1962 after runs in Oxford and London, which served as the basis of David Lean’s 1985 film of the novel.